A floating connector element formulation for multi-level modelling of composite structures

Journal Article (2020)
Author(s)

E. S. Kocaman (Imperial College London)

Bo Yang Chen (TU Delft - Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics)

S. T. Pinho (Imperial College London)

Research Group
Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics
Copyright
© 2020 E. S. Kocaman, B. Y. Chen, S. T. Pinho
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruct.2020.112532
More Info
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Publication Year
2020
Language
English
Copyright
© 2020 E. S. Kocaman, B. Y. Chen, S. T. Pinho
Research Group
Aerospace Structures & Computational Mechanics
Volume number
251
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Abstract

Design and optimisation of large structures, including the positioning of lower-level components, typically require extensive user involvement and sequential mechanical analysis/optimisation iterations. This paper presents an original method that enables adaptive positioning of lower-level models (such as components) within higher level-models (such as large structures), and that achieves a combined mechanical/optimisation problem for the design of structures with various hierarchical levels (such as the positioning of stiffeners within a wingbox). As the position of the lower-level model evolves, our proposed method does not require re-generating of the geometry, remeshing or modifying the stiffness matrix of the elements corresponding to the various hierarchical levels. Instead, we achieve the adaptive positioning via an original concept that we propose here: Floating Connector (FC) elements. In this paper, we validate the FC elements against reference purely-mechanical solutions, show that they can be combined with gradient-descent method and genetic algorithms, and that they can be applied to optimise the positioning of a stiffener runout taking into account a debonding manufacturing defect.

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